Here’s another example of how determined ordinary Soviet infantrymen could be, especially in engagements with high symbolic value. In a book that he wrote, Marshal Chuikov describes an incident that allegedly occured during the Red Army’s assault on Berlin. A Soviet tank somehow got isolated during the street fighting for the city and was damaged by a German anti-tank round. All but one of its crew were killed. The surviving (though wounded) crewman kept working the main gun, loading and aiming and firing it by himself. When the main gun ran out of ammunition, or was wrecked by another enemy hit (I can’t remember which; I read the book a long time ago), the Russian soldier proceeded to fire the tank’s machine gun at the nearby Germans. When that ran out of ammunition, he started lobbing grenades out of the tank to drive off the Germans who were pounding on the hull and demanding that he surrender. A fresh Soviet unit finally arrived and forced the Germans to retreat. The Russian reinforcements got into the wrecked tank and found the last crewman inside. He was dying of his wounds, but he was holding a knife in his hand, ready to use it to make a final stand against any German soldier who had tried to enter the tank. After telling the other soldiers what had happened, his final words were supposedly, “Thank you, comrades, for not leaving my body in the hands of the Fascists.”
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